* The Pac-12 Hotline newsletter is published each Monday-Wednesday-Friday during the college sports season (and twice-a-week in the summer). This edition, from Feb. 13, has been made available in archived form …

A deep dive into the Pac-12 Networks

If you haven’t seen it on the website or referenced on my Twitter feed, the Hotline this morning published an examination of the Pac-12 Networks as seen from the perspective of the campuses: The initial expectations, the shrinking reach and the grim financial reality.

The article has loads of new financial and audience data. When you account for the true cost of the content that was used to create the networks, the revenue distributed is only a fraction of what some campus administrators expected.

It’s an important subject, because the networks are, in theory, for the schools and about the schools.

Yes, the production is terrific and yes, the networks have created exposure for the Olympic sports, but I wonder:

If the presidents and chancellors had known in 2011 what they know now, would they have signed off on the ownership model?

We’ll never know, and it will be a warm, sunny day in Seattle before any of the CEOs discuss that topic publicly.

At the same time, the networks are one piece of the larger canvass that is the Pac-12’s long-haul media strategy, and the Hotline is attempting to cover all angles.

Links to previously-published content on that strategy are included with this morning’s article. I’d encourage everyone to read/listen to as much as possible to get the full view, from 40,000 feet and from ground level.

The time spent on this morning’s deep dive caused me to fall behind schedule on the newsletter. My apologies for this abbreviated edition. –Jon Wilner.

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Hot off the Hotline

• Robert Franks is the best player on a bad team in the conference and one of the best one-man shows we’ve seen in 15 years, since Ike Diogu roamed the paint for Arizona State. That and more in the latest power ratings.

Why we need your support: Like so many other providers of local journalism across the country, the Hotline’s parent website, mercurynews.com, recently moved to a subscription model. A few Hotline stories will remain free each month (as will this newsletter), but for access to all content, you’ll need to subscribe at a rate of just 12 cents per day for 12 months. And thanks for your loyalty.

In the news

(Note: The Hotline newsletter includes links to sites that could require a subscription once the number of free views has been reached.)

• Stanford scored just 46 points in Eugene without injured guard Daejon Davis. He might not play tonight against USC, either.

• Chase Jeter deserves all-conference recognition based on Arizona’s performance with and without him.

Draft Developments

• Former UCLA star Maurice Jones-Drew has joined NFL.com as a draft analyst. His first-round mock has WSU’s Andre Dillard going in the middle of the round and ASU’s N’Keal Harry and Washington’s Byron Murphy going late.

Jon Wilner has been covering college sports for decades and is an AP top-25 football and basketball voter as well as a Heisman Trophy voter. He was named Beat Writer of the Year in 2013 by the Football Writers Association of America for his coverage of the Pac-12, won first place for feature writing in 2016 in the Associated Press Sports Editors writing contest and is a five-time APSE honoree.

Before the first Pac-12 game of the NCAA Tournament tips off this evening (Arizona State vs. St. John's), let’s address the scoreboard that matters most to the nine teams not involved in March Madness.

Brian Bennett, formerly of ESPN and currently a contributor to The Athletic — he authors the site’s bracketology feature — writes a weekly Pac-12 basketball column for the Hotline. I was asked on a couple of radio shows this week if there’s anything the Pac-12 could do to redeem itself in this NCAA tournament. The short answer: not really. Sure,...

When state legislators grilled University of California staff about the university’s response to the recent college admissions scandal, Assemblyman Kevin McCarty asked the question that’s been reverberating since the story broke last week. “How do we reassure the public that the system is not totally rigged?”